The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com

Friday, August 21, 2009

Friday's notes

School's back Monday. To get you in the mood, here's a clip from Back to School:

The DBR reports that the mold lawsuit filed by Ted Klein's family has been dismissed by Judge Story. Apparently, you can only get $1,000 under the Federal Employees Compensation Act when death results from on-duty injuries of a federal employee. Readers, can this law be constitutional? That seems insane to me.

The UBS case keeps going and going and going. This time a banker and a lawyer have been indicted. Via Curt Anderson:

A banker and a lawyer from Switzerland were indicted Thursday on fraud charges for allegedly helping rich Americans evade taxes by hiding assets in Swiss banks, including UBS AG and a smaller Zurich-based institution.

Among the allegations in court documents against banker Hansruedi Schumacher, 51, and 42-year-old attorney Matthias Rickenbach is that they told a New York businessman they paid an unnamed Swiss government official a $45,000 bribe for information on whether the businessman's account would be revealed to U.S. investigators.

Schumacher and Rickenbach each face a single charge of conspiring to defraud the U.S., which carries a potential five-year prison sentence. Prosecutors said both men remain in Switzerland, and it wasn't immediately clear if they had U.S. lawyers to represent them.

The indictment comes one day after the Swiss and U.S. governments unveiled an agreement in which UBS will divulge names of some 4,450 wealthy Americans suspected of dodging taxes through secret bank accounts. Many of those people, and the bankers and attorneys who advised them, could also face criminal charges.

And from the last post, we're debating Plaxico Burress' two year sentence in the comments. Go post your thoughts.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

why is it that people with liberal mindsets instantly think something is unconstitutional the moment they do not agree with the results of the statute? Obviously the federal compensation system is likely outdated and should be modernized. But we disagree with a particular result and jump on the constitutional bandwagen. makes you realize how valuable justice scalia really is (even when he is wrong, as in the earlier post).

Yeah! Yeah! Like the way liberals automatically thought McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional, or that the Brady Bill was unconstitutional, or that death panels are being set up to kill grandma - they are such knee-jerk reactionaries. It is a good think that we have activist justices like Scalia and Alito who can rationalize any outcome that suits their view of the world - I mean really, stopping a good old fashion execution on the lame grounds that the person might be innocent.

The Southern District of Florida blog is authored by David Oscar Markus, who is a criminal trial and appellate lawyer in Miami, Florida. He frequently practices in federal courts around the country, including his hometown, the Southern District of Florida and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.